A judge ruled Tuesday that medics should be allowed to switch off life support for a severely brain damaged baby.

Mr Justice O’Hara, sitting in the High Court in Belfast, made the ruling after hearing that the five-month-old baby “has suffered such overwhelming and irreversible brain damage that in all likelihood he is now blind, deaf, severely mentally handicapped and severely physically disabled”.

The child, only referred to as M, was born in October last year but “was involved in an incident on 7 March 2014 which caused his heart to stop”.

He was taken to hospital where doctors managed to get his heart started again but his brain had been starved of oxygen.

In his judgement, Justice O’Hara added: “It is likely (but not certain) the brain damage is such that he is not in pain.

He is currently being kept alive by a ventilator because it is believed he could not breathe unaided for more than a short period of time.

“Successive scans have shown no improvement. The doctors believe M can never recover to any form of living which does not involve continual ventilation; he would not be able to interact with anyone and would have no recognisable quality of life.”

The court had to rule on the child’s treatment because, the judgement stated, M’s parents do not want the ventilator to be switched off. Evidence also emerged of a medic who, it was claimed, was offering the family false hope of the child recovering.

The ruling stated that M’s father, “whose distress and desperation the Judge acknowledged as being almost unimaginable, had sent video clips of M in intensive care to a ‘controversial figure’, Professor Z, who claims to specialise in the rehabilitation of patients in another country”.

The Judge heard evidence from Professor Z that he was of the opinion M could make a recovery if he was treated with, amongst other things, a technique of neuro-stimulation designed and demonstrated by him.

M’s doctors described the supposed neuro-stimulation demonstrated by Professor Z as being “little more than massaging M’s face, head and limbs”.

The Judge rejected the evidence of Professor Z that his neuro-stimulation technique would in any way start to reverse the brain damage and considered his evidence had “merely given a distressed, grieving family false hope where there was none”.